1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a micro-fluidic chip, particularly to such a chip for high-throughput screening and high-throughput assay, in which its structure is improved, thereby enhancing the efficiency of high-throughput screening and high-throughput assay.
2. Background of the Related Art
In general, a well plate has been used for biological and chemical experiments. There are a 16-well plate, a 48-well plate or a 96-well plate depending on the number of wells. Recently, a plate having more than 1536 wells has been introduced for a high-throughput assay.
Further, the advancement in micro-machining technique facilitates the development of micro-fluidic chips for a high-throughput assay. U.S. Pat. No. 6,235,520 B1 discloses a micro-fluidic chip having a high degree of integration. However, only the highly integrated structure would not help injecting a reagent into each individual well independently.
Also, an article, “Microfluidic device for single-cell analysis” A. R. Wheeler; Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 75, pp. 3581-3586, 2003, has proposed a chip in which a cell is immobilized at a desired place, and a reagent is injected through a fluid passage. However, it has disadvantages in that the cell cannot be stably held in place in absence of fluid flow and many numbers of cells cannot be analyzed at the same time due to its one-dimensional configuration.
The above-described conventional micro-fluidic chip has increased only its degree of integration, and thus additional control devices are required for loading a specimen and reagent into the highly-integrated wells. Furthermore, in the case where the specimen and reagent are a fluid, its amount is reduced due to the high integration and thus easily evaporated.